[Marxism] From Capitalism to Socialism: The Revolutionary Process in Venezuela

["Darrel Furlotte" <darrel.furlotte@xxxxxxxxx>]

I'd have posted just a clip and the link (below), but the red typerface on a 
black bachgroud is impossible to read.
Darrel

The Next Great Transformation
>From Capitalism to Socialism: The Revolutionary Process in Venezuela
http://www.revolutionanalysis.blogspot.com/
by Quincy Saul, March 2009

"[E]s la marcha a fondo..." -Hugo Chavez Frias, 2006
"[T]he long term starts now..." -Raul Prebisch, 1983

In 1944, the Austrian scholar and activist Karl Polanyi published his famous 
and most influential book, The Great Transformation. In this book he 
attempted to chronicle and describe the transformation of the world by 
markets. Simply, Polanyi endeavored to describe the emergence of capitalism. 
Markets existed before capitalism, Polanyi argued, but always within a 
social framework that limited their size and prerogative. The emergence of 
capitalism, as Polanyi described it, entailed the subordination of all of 
these social frameworks to the rules of the market. What transpired was 
nothing less than the most consequential and explosive revolution in the 
history of the world. Even today, the great transformation continues. 
Capitalism continues to transform lives and landscapes on both massive and 
intimate scales in unprecedented, and perhaps irrevocable ways.

Capitalism, understood as the systematic organization of the world around 
market forces,has unleashed productive capacities on scales never before 
imagined. What we call the industrial revolution was a tributary of the 
larger revolution of capitalism, which overturned ancient societies and 
power structures in mere generations on every continent. By subordinating 
the social to the economic, the power to change and create was abundant as 
never before. But the astounding dynamism of this new way of life has come a 
price. Markets are amazing at creating wealth, but they do so 
indiscriminately. Markets on their own know neither restraint nor regret. In 
their insatiable need for new resources, both human and natural, markets 
take too much too fast, leading to widespread abuses resulting in both human 
crises and ecosystem collapses. And in their equally insatiable accumulation 
of profits, markets are again indiscriminate. In markets, money and power 
talks, and it is those few who have them that reap their benefits. 
Meanwhile, those who lack them are forced into ever greater poverty, 
subordination and exclusion. As Eduardo Galeano writes in the opening lines 
of his book The Open Veins of Latin America, "[t]he international division 
of labor consists of some countries who specialize in winning, and others in 
losing." (p1) To summarize, capitalism creates breathtaking possibilities, 
and simultaneously prevents humanity from enjoying them in either a 
sustainable or a collective way.

>From this realization has come the demand for the next great transformation. 
The social and environmental catastrophes that accompany the first great 
transformation are intolerable -- no progress could be worth such horrors. 
"The perpetuation of the current order of things," writes Galeano, "is the 
perpetuation of crime". (p11) The next great transformation would preserve 
the economic dynamism of the first great transformation, but bring it under 
the control of social priorities. This reconciliation of the social the 
economic, which recognizes the possibilities of the economic but which 
demands the primacy of the social, has been and is still today called 
socialism. Socialism would be a systematic (re)organization of human society 
around a harmony of the social and the economic. The transition from 
capitalism to socialism -- the next great transformation -- has not only 
been the subject of hundreds of books, but millions of people have lived and 
died for it, and many more are sure to make the ultimate sacrifice in its 
name. The scope of this essay will be necessarily humble -- I intend only to 
make some simple explanations and to raise a few significant ideas and 
questions about this next great transformation as it is taking place today, 
in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

In a speech in 2007, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez Frias reflected on the 
difficulties of constructing socialism on the foundation of capitalism. "Men 
and women make history," Chavez quoted Marx, "but only so far as history 
lets them." In other words, the immense task of transforming an entire 
society is always shaped by the particular conditions of the already 
existing society. Socialism, after all, must be built somewhere, and that 
where is always already full of people with all their particular histories 
and relationships. Michael Lebowitz, in his book about socialism in 
Venezuela calledBuild It Now! writes that "[s]ocialism doesn't drop from the 
sky. It is necessarily rooted in particular societies. And that is why 
reliance upon detailed universal models misleads us". (p67) The first 
important point I would like to emphasize is that the next great 
transformation will necessarily be a greatly diverse transformation, 
specific to people and places. As any Venezuelan can tell you, it is a 
process, not a blueprint. However, this simple explanation may hide a great 
deal of contradiction and conflict that this process contains.

In 1908, in her book Reform or Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg published many 
interesting thoughts that are very relevant to the process of transformation 
in Venezuela. One "particularity of the capitalist order," she wrote, "is 
that all the elements of the future society that exist in it initially 
assume a form that doesn't bring us closer to socialism, but takes us 
farther away from it." In other words, capitalist society contains in embryo 
many of the characteristics of socialism, but develops them in a way that 
makes the realization of socialism ever harder. For instance, the capitalist 
productive process increasingly brings people together to work. This move 
towards increasingly 'social production' has lead many to predict that 
capitalism will lead directly, if not perfectly smoothly, towards socialism. 
Luxemburg's insight is that this transition is neither direct nor 
necessarily inevitable. Capitalism brings people together to work in 
factories, but it does so under conditions of alienation, exploitation and 
repression, while simultaneously spreading ideologies that legitimize and 
reinforce business as usual and the status quo, all of which actively 
prevents the emergence of socialism.

Luxemburg's insight also has implications for that is known as 'stage theory'. 
According to stage theory, the first great transformation must be complete 
before the next great transformation can be possible. Specifically, many 
stage theorists argue that only capitalism is capable of accumulating the 
productive forces from which socialism can be developed. In other words, 
socialism cannot be realized until capitalism is fully developed. Stage 
theories of this kind have been frequently rebutted on both moral and 
scientific grounds, but Luxemburg is particularly relevant here in that she 
predicts that the development of capitalism actually takes us ever farther 
way from socialism.

All of this raises many difficult questions about visions and strategies for 
the transition from socialism to capitalism. Capitalism continues to grow, 
the first great transformation continues, and more and more of our lives and 
our lands are every day put on the market. The breadth and resilience of 
capitalism has lead many to resign themselves to it, to settle for it, and 
to denounce the socialist process as impossible, naive, or "utopian". But 
conversations with people in the barrios of Caracas, the capital city of 
Venezuela, can go a long way in challenging this kind of outlook. The 
historically oppressed poor are ever more empowered, politicized, educated 
and organized, not to mention healthy. Problems persist in great abundance, 
but Venezuela has made it clear that the next great transformation is not an 
impossible dream. On the contrary, writes Venezuelan Rafael Ramon 
Castellanos in his latest book,

we are seeing it in the new socialism for the 21st century in which are 
immersed not only Venezuelans but all people of thought in the universe who 
see the light of integration imposing itself on the horizon, while the 
goal-keepers of the empire vacillate and sow fear and terror everywhere. 
(p23)

The process is incomplete and in many ways fragile. Goal-keepers of empire 
wear many masks. The people of Venezuela know that the next great 
transformation will take many generations of struggle. And in many ways, 
this struggle is just beginning.

Venezuela is a capitalist country with a socialist government. Neither the 
declarations of a president nor improved education and health care are 
enough to transform a thoroughly entrenched economic and social system. 
While this is obvious to anyone living in Venezuela, international followers 
of simplistic leftist media may need to be reminded. Centuries of 
colonization and political dictatorship, along with many decades of 
subordination to foreign markets, cannot be transformed into democratic 
socialism in a few years. Big and easy profits from oil exports have created 
over the generations a small but very rich, powerful and developed political 
oligarchy and consumer society. Leftist Venezuelans will be the first to 
tell you that Venezuela is the most capitalist country in Latin America. 
There is even a hummer assembly line. In every sphere of state organization; 
legislative, judicial and executive, a lot of corruption persists. 
Meanwhile, "the bureaucratic monster," as one Venezuelan described it to me, 
has only continued to grow. Another explained to me simply that "there are 
many rats, and only a few cats to eat them".

Much of the persistence of these problems can be attributed to the 
particular form that the revolutionary process has taken until now in 
Venezuela. Since Chavez first publicly declared the revolutionary process to 
be a socialist one in 2004, he has been very careful to establish important 
qualifying conditions. The Venezuelan socialism of the 21st century is to be 
both democratic and peaceful. Moreover, Chavez has been explicit that the 
revolution does not intend to challenge private property. All of these 
conditions and the last one in particular, laudable though they may sound, 
have very vital consequences for the way that the revolutionary process 
develops.

Almost all socialist revolutions in world history have challenged private 
property, specifically private ownership of the means of production. In the 
strict sense of the terms, this has neither been a democratic nor peaceful 
procedure. Owners of the means of production are not given a voice in the 
process, and their property is taken by force. Instead of taking this 
traditional path, the revolutionary process in Venezuela until now has 
instead emphasized redistribution and democratization. Instead of promoting 
and sponsoring immediate takeovers of the means of production, Chavez and 
the United Socialist Party of Venezuela have advocated instead that workers 
be given a larger share of the profits and a louder voice in decisions that 
affect them.

In 1983, the Argentine economist Raul Prebisch wrote an article titledFive 
Steps of My Thoughts About Development, reflecting on the many decades of 
his work in government and international institutions as an economic 
advisor. Prebisch is worth quoting at length here, because he makes several 
ominous predictions that are quite relevant to the current course of the 
Venezuelan transition from capitalism to socialism:

Democratic processes have demonstrated a great efficacy in the improvement 
of real incomes and in the evolution of the state. But in the current system 
a limit exists that the power of redistribution can't exceed, a limit that, 
once reached, puts the dynamic of the system in danger. When it arrives at 
this limit, surplus achieves its maximum level, and the privileged society 
of consumption can't continue anymore like it could before the 
redistributive process that tends to improve the distribution of income... 
redistributive pressure will lead in this case to a crisis of the system. 
The democratic process tends to devour itself... I must lamentably conclude 
that, in the advanced course of peripheral development, the process of 
democratization tends to become incompatible with the regular functioning of 
the system. This is not due as much to the failure of this process, derived 
from the prevalent political immaturity in the periphery, but to the grave 
socioeconomic bias of the mechanism of distribution of income and 
accumulation of capital in favor of the upper social classes.

The revolutionary process in Venezuela is currently reaching the limit and 
undergoing the crises to which Prebisch referred 26 years ago. In recent 
years, the limit and the crisis have not been manifested in a giant 
cataclysm that shakes the entire society. Instead, it is a diffuse crisis, 
less visible than a generalized crisis but no less deadly. I will cite only 
two recent examples of how the democratic process is, as Prebisch predicted, 
devouring itself.

On January 12th of this year, workers at a Mitsubishi factory in the state 
of Anzoategui occupied a factory in protest of the company executives' 
decision to not rehire 135 contract workers. 18 days into the occupation, on 
January 30th, three of the workers participating in the occupation, Javier 
Marcano, Pedro Suarez and Alexander Garcia, were shot dead by police. Six 
other workers and two police officers were wounded and taken to the 
hospital. Relevantly, Felix Martinez, general secretary of the union 
Singetram, said that the company is trying on a national level to convert 
into a "capitalist cooperative". The precarious limit of this tenuous dual 
strategy of capitalist management and socialist organization is clearly 
defined by the events of January 30th.

More recently, on February 12th of this year, Nelson Lopez, a leader of the 
farmer organization Frente Campesino Jirajara, was murdered on his way home. 
He was shot 14 times in the back by hired assassins under the orders of Luis 
Gallo, a large landowner in the state of Yaracuy. Both of these examples 
reveal the limitations of the "peaceful and democratic" revolutionary 
process in Venezuela. As Prebisch warned, policies of democratization and 
redistribution, when they take place within a capitalist system, have 
definite limits. They become incompatible with the regular functioning of 
the system, and result in crises as the upper classes retaliate against the 
loss of their privileges.

I should be clear that my intention here is not in any way to condemn the 
revolutionary process in Venezuela. In a very brief amount of time (it has 
barely over four years since the socialist project was announced) the Chavez 
government has achieved immense progress in spite of powerful and organized 
domestic and international opposition. I merely offer a sympathetic analysis 
of the revolution, which has come a very long way, but which I fear in some 
important ways is reaching a structural limit imposed by the capitalist 
economic system which is still very much alive in Venezuela. It is an open 
question how much longer the revolutionary process can proceed without 
directly confronting capitalism on more than an ideological front, before 
the contradictions become an unbearable strain on society. "We know that the 
desire to develop a good society for people is not sufficient," writes 
Lebowitz, "-- you have to be prepared to break with the logic of capital in 
order to build a better world". (p72)

"[T]hose who choose the reformist path... don't in reality elect a more 
tranquil path," wrote Rosa Luxemburg. This has become undeniable in 
Venezuela today, proven by the deaths of Nelson Lopez and the factory 
workers in Anzoategui, among many others. The peaceful revolution, in the 
effort to avoid a large scale conflagration of violence, has necessarily 
invited a slower and smaller-scale but predictably extended and dispersed 
quantity of violence, as the old power structures attempt to defend their 
privileges against the new. As Luxemburg knew and Prebisch predicted, the 
path of reform, (in the Venezuelan case democratization and redistribution 
without challenging private ownership of the means of production) quickly 
reaches its limit. This limit is no secret to Chavez, who in the same speech 
warned that "[r]eformism can accompany a revolution for a time, but there is 
a barrier past which this reformism becomes counter-revolutionary".

The persistent appeal of reform in spite of its known and predictable 
failures is nothing new. "Everyone wants to see new results without changes 
and changes without movements," wrote Simon Bolivar. (quoted in Castellano, 
p38) Luxemburg is worth quoting at length. Reform and revolution may at 
certain times appear initially to to share the same path, but they are 
essentially at fundamental odds. The path of reform and reformers

is not one that moves slowly and surely towards the same objective... in 
place of creating a new society, they choose some insubstantial 
modifications of the old... they don't seek the realization of socialism, 
but the reform of capitalism, they don't seek the suppression of the system 
of salaried work, but the diminishing of exploitation. In summary, they don't 
seek the suppression of capitalism, but the attenuation of its abuses.

As many revolutionaries all over the world have realized, reformers can 
become the most resilient and insidious obstacles in the way of 
revolutionary transformation. Again, this reality has not been missed by 
Chavez. "Beware of the reformist currents that fear a real revolution," he 
reminded: "This is one of the greatest threats that we face, within, it is 
like cholesterol, some call it the silent assassin, it is the 
counter-revolutionary reformism, within ourselves". Even self-declared 
enemies of empire can function as its gate-keepers. Many people who support 
the revolutionary process in Venezuela today are opposed to challenging 
private ownership of the means of production, in favor of the peaceful and 
democratic redistribution of profits. In response to the strategy and 
ideology of reform, there is perhaps no better response than something that 
I heard Subcommandante Marcos of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation 
say at a conference in 2007:

"Maybe some of you have seen those commercials that announce products that 
make you thinner without doing exercise... there is an advertisement for a 
cookie that will give you a spectacular figure, without doing more exercise 
than putting the product in your mouth and chewing it. In the same way... is 
the idea that one can transform social relations without struggling and 
without touching the privileges that the powerful enjoy."

Private possession of the means of production is perhaps the core material 
essence of capitalism. Around this axis turns the accumulation of profits 
and power. Modifying the distribution of profits while leaving intact the 
concentration of power is the equivalent of one of Marcos' diet cookies, 
that is at same time high in what Chavez characterized as 
counter-revolutionary cholesterol. Private control of capital is 
irreconcilable with socialism. As a factory worker's slogan during the 
Russian revolution demanded, "The right to life is higher than the right to 
property!" It may be relevant that this slogan did not come from and was not 
approved by the Bolshevik party.1

Rising contradictions rock all boats. Chavez and revolutionary socialists 
all over Venezuela, along with capitalists and the historically privileged, 
are well aware of the struggle that awaits them. A socialist project which 
commits itself both to democratic and peaceful methods and to radical 
anti-capitalist ideology has never before been attempted, and the whole 
world is watching. How much longer and how much farther the revolution can 
advance without more directly challenging the powerful capitalist economic 
system that still dominates in Venezuela, and at what cost this delay will 
come, is very difficult to calculate. But we can be sure that these 
contradictions cannot be suffered forever. Chavez addressed this 
specifically in his 2007 speech:

[T]he internal situation is going to sharpen, in the coming months, more 
contradictions will arise, simply because we don't have plans to detain the 
march of the revolution; on the contrary, it is a thorough march, and as the 
revolution goes deepening itself, expanding itself, these contradictions are 
going to flower, including some that, until now, have been covered up, they 
are going to sharpen, they are going to intensify, because we're talking 
about economics, and there is nothing that hurts a capitalist more than 
their pocket, but we have to enter this theme, we cannot avoid it.

Whether Chavez has a plan up his sleeve, or whether he intends to wait for 
the ever more organized and empowered people to carry the revolution to its 
next stage on their own, we can only speculate. But the next great 
transformation cannot fully continue until the core material essence of 
capitalism is effectively challenged.

Meanwhile, capitalism continues to gestate and metabolize society, and if 
Luxemburg is right, the longer it takes to begin, the harder the 
transformation will be. Prebisch wisely alerted in his 1970 
bookTransformation and Development that "[t]ime doesn't resolve problems on 
its own". On the contrary, "it incessantly aggravates them". (p152) Not only 
in Venezuela but in the entire world, all of these questions are of intense 
urgency. While "revolutions are not exported", as revolutionaries from Che 
Guevara to Nora Castaneda have reminded us, we all have a lot to learn from 
a close analysis of the development of socialist revolution in Venezuela 
today.

The Bolivarian vision of international unity in resistance to capitalism is 
the most significant and promising advance for the next great transformation 
that the world has seen in generations. But no one in the world can simply 
sit back and watch. As Marcos wrote in one of his communiques, "there are no 
seats outside the ring". We all have an important role to play in the next 
great transformation, and if we aren't promoting it we are more than likely 
impeding it. "We need an international politics inspired in a long term 
vision of centers and peripheries," wrote Prebisch, "But the long term 
starts now".

Peaceful revolution is an appealing prospect, but perhaps a disingenuous 
dream. The price of postponing the inevitable conflict between the 
fundamentally opposed structures of capitalism and socialism is an 
intensifying climate of contradiction and hate where individuals and small 
organizations must face the brutality of reactionary power structures on 
their own. By preventing a nationally organized movement to advance the 
transformation to its next stage, the revolutionary state arguably puts its 
citizens at greater and more prolonged risk than if it were to lead the 
movement itself. While the social and ideological transformation in 
Venezuela continues to grow and expand in essential ways, the economic 
transformation for the moment has been stalemated. It is a very serious and 
grave matter, for which there will be no light answers. "I," declared Josue 
de Castro, "who have received an international peace prize, think that, 
unhappily, there is no other solution than violence for Latin America." 
(quoted by Galeano, p5)


1. History of the Russian Revolution, by Leon Trotsky, 1930 (vol.1 p419)


References:
(in order of appearance)
Las Venas Abiertas de America Latina, por Eduardo Galeano, 1971
El Discurso del Inicio de la Construccion del Partido Socialista Unido, por 
Hugo Chavez Frias, March 24, 2007
Build It Now! Socialism for the 21st Century, by Michael Lebowitz, 2006
Reform or Revolution, by Rosa Luxemburg, 1908 Referenced chapter: The 
Conquest of Political Power
Simon Rodriguez, Las Misiones, Y el Socialismo del Siglo XXI, por Rafael 
Ramon Castellanos, 2008
Cinco Etapas de Mi Pensamiento Sobre Desarollo, por Raul Prebisch, 1983
En Yaracuy, privados de libertad asesinos del dirigente campesino Nelson 
Lopez, por Frente Campesino Jirajara, March 1st, 2009: 
www.aporrea.org/ddhh/n129863.html
Two Factory Workers Killed During Factory Occupation in Venezuela, by Tamara 
Pearson, January 30th 2009: www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/4156
Transformacion y Desarollo, La Gran Tarea de la America Latina, por Raul 
Prebisch, 1970
Ni Centro Ni Periferia, por Subcommandante Insurgente Marcos, speech 
delivered at the International Colloquium on Anti-Systemic Movements, La 
Universidad de la Tierra, Chiapas, Mexico, December 2007. (Part One: La 
Geografia y el Calendario de la Teoria)
Creando Una Economia Solidaria, por Nora Castaneda

(all translations by Quincy Saul) 


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